Howl and Other Poems

I guess, I liked this one. Just a few words: Bizzare, Baffling, heartfelt, hot-blooded!

It reminded me of a day, two years back, When I bought a paperback of Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, that day, after glancing inside, I wondered if it was a poem book or prose! This man gave me the same overflow of emotions in his long streaks of repeated words...
My forearm horripilate!

n   Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy!.......

Holy the groaning saxophone! Holy the bop apocalypse! Holy the jazzbands marijuana hipsters peace peyote pipes & drums!

Holy the solitudes of skyscrapers and pavements! Holy the cafeterias filled with the millions! Holy the mysterious rivers of tears under the streets!

Holy the lone juggernaut! Holy the vast lamb of the middleclass! Holy the crazy shepherds of rebellion! Who digs Los Angeles IS Los Angeles!
....... n

'William Carlos Williams' wrote at the beginning of this book that he used to know Allen Ginsberg when they were young. Allen was much disturbed by life after the first world war and Carlos never thought Allen would live to grow up and write a book of poems. 'His ability to survive, travel and go on writing astonishes me" Carlos said.

After reading the passionate verse in this book, I can understand what William Carlos Williams connotes by saying that!

Rewritten Review

It isn't hard to see why Ginsberg is considered to be one of the best poets that came from America, nor one of the best poets of the Beat Generation.

Within each and every poem, his words create such vivid imagery within the reader's head and this allows you to walk through the poem with ease. The meaning of each poem slowly forms in the back of your mind, and you find yourself softly daydreaming with the imagery of each poem. Although the words used are sometimes complex, they can also be simple, which creates a whole new world of poetry for me; most poets I read either use complex OR simple, never have I come across a poet that used both in the same poems. Ginsberg manages to create whole new worlds out of something simple as a description of a sunflower (shown in Sunflower Sutra) and it's truly spectacular and breathtaking. Sunflower Sutra is a beautiful poem that has reminded me of everyone's self worth as a human. Pure, clean - like a sunflower.

This is an absolutely beautiful collection of works and I highly recommend it to anyone and everyone who adores poetry, or those who just want something short to read. I found this to fill my time with wonder and beauty, and it was a lovely distraction from a world going to shit.

Easy to overestimate Allen Ginsberg. Easy to underestimate him too.

There are—if you leave out the political, religious and major historical figures—only about two dozen or so 20th century cultural icons, and Ginsberg is one of them—right up there with Einstein, Bogart, James Dean, and Marilyn Monroe. In the 60's, his face was ubiquitous, and the Ginsberg poster you picked out for yourself showed the kind of Ginsberg you aspired to be: Ginsberg in Uncle Sam hat, naked Ginsberg embracing naked Peter Orlovsky, psychedelic “Moses” Ginsberg holding up two stone tablets of the Law of “Who to be Kind to,” or Ginsberg protesting in the snow and wearing a big sign that says “Pot is Fun.” He was a hipster, a hedonist and a holy man, standing up for every form of free expression you could imagine, smiling from the walls of every coffeehouse, every bookstore, every other two room apartment that you knew. And it was hard to get past all those posters and just sit down and read the poetry.

But if you got past all that, it was still hard to separate the political from the poetic. His most famous poem "Howl" was the center of a notorious free speech fight, and many of the later poems, from “America” to “Wichita Vortex Sutra” and beyond, could not be fully understood without some knowledge of the protest movements of the time. However, if you did actually sit down and read some of his poetry--away from the context, away from the intoxicating counter-cultural atmosphere--you might begin to suspect that Ginsberg the Poetry Icon was superior to Irwin Allen Ginsberg from Newark, New Jersey, the guy who actually sat down and wrote what is often—frankly--mediocre verse.

Part of the problem stems from the length of Ginsberg's free verse line: it is indeed a very long line, habitually a few beats longer than a dactylic hexameter. (Even when he breaks a line into W.C.Williams “triads,” it still seems to be long.) Most poets who choose such a line as their vehicle (Kit Smart, Martin Tupper, Whitman, Fearing, Jeffers, Ginsberg) come off sounding biblical and orotund in long passages which lack lyricism and are often indistinguishable from mediocre prose. (C.K. Williams--perhaps because of his narrative drive--is the notable exception here). When you add to this the fact that Ginsberg delights in improvisation, and once embraced as his model the “no revisions necessary” Kerouac prose style, it is little wonder that many of his lines fail to sing.

But, as I said, it is easy to underestimate him too, particularly if we “just sit down and read” his poetry, divorcing it from the world of cultural influences and public performance that he loved. For example, if you sit down to read “Howl,” and it seems too ponderous, too much like the prophet Jeremiah wailing for all the pitiful beatnik dead, just stop for a minute and go download some early 50's jazz--Herbie Nichols maybe, or Lee Konitz or the MJQ—and play it quietly in the background while you stand up and recite the poem aloud to yourself—swaying a little, perhaps even snapping your fingers. You may begin to discover unexpected deposits of gentle humor, the occasional pocket of sick humor, and even a little slapstick from time to time, and also sense--knitting the four movements of this magnificent performance piece together—an overarching, self-conscious hipster irony which refuses for even one second to take Ginsberg the Prophet or Ginsberg the Poetry Icon completely seriously.

As you probably can tell, I love “Howl.” I think it is a masterwork of American poetry, unique and irreplaceable. This collections also contains four shorter pieces almost as good: ”A Supermarket in California” (an encounter with Walt Whitman, who is “eyeing the grocery boys”), ”America” (a love letter to the USA and a protest poem at the same time, ending with the memorable line, “America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel"), “Sunflower Sutra” (a conversation with Kerouac in Frisco about a gray dead sunflower which ends with a “sermon” proclaiming that “we are all beautiful golden sunflowers inside”), and “In the Baggage Room at Greyhound” (Irwin Allen Ginsberg's farewell to a job he obviously hated).

These five poems make up only 70% of this small 50 page collection, and the rest of the poems included here I don't think are worth reading at all. (But then I didn't experiment with jazz in the background. So I just might be underestimating Ginsberg once again.)

mind blowing! i can't wait to read more of his poetry

زوزه جزو شعرائیه که تا آخر عمرم فراموش‌اش نخواهم کرد. مدت طولانی بهش گوش می‌دادم (با صدای خود آلن گینزبرگ) و هر جمله‌ش رو صدها بار با خودم تکرار می‌کردم. بعدها یه جا از قول براهنی خوندم که تو آمریکا با گینزبرگ دوست بوده و اگه اسماعیل رو خونده باشین هم به تاثیر گرفتن براهنی از زوزه و کددیش برای نوشتن‌اش می‌شه پی برد و هم به توانایی براهنی در شخصی کردن سبکی که از گینزبرگ وام گرفته و بهترین شکل ممکن ارائه‌اش کرده.
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who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz...

If Allen Ginsberg's poems were a music style, it would be a mixture of psychedelic rock and grunge rock.
The rants in his poems are rebellious. He unloads his frustrations, rejects the standard narrative values, and explores an alternative emancipation through spiritual enlightenment and drugs.
"Howl" is undoubtedly the voice of a generation anxious for sexual liberation and exploration of new lifestyles. Ginsberg's main poem is, moderately, a hymn to society's misfits, to the misunderstood artists who rumble in the streets. In addition to that, the nature of the poem about drugs, alcohol, and sexuality highlights a counter-culture movement that seeks (hedonistic) freedom.
"America" is another poem worth mentioning; An intimate conversation between the narrator and America. The poetic nature is highly sarcastic and political.
In "A Supermarket in California", Ginsberg presents an amusing poem about a dream (or psychedelic trip) he had where he encountered Walt Whitman in a supermarket. It's probably the best poem on the book, after "Howl".
In Ginsberg's poems, one can see a certain level of alienation on those young men, a beat generation disgusted with the world. It was, after all, this beat generation that made the 60s hippy culture thrive. Perhaps without them, we wouldn't have bands like The Doors and The Beatles.
Overall, the rawness and the sadness of Ginsberg's work is something remarkable. His poetic style had undoubtedly an important meaning when it was written.

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war, ”

Rating: 3,5/5 stars

if only i had my very own jess to put some notes in the margins for me

Howl is best read at 2 am, burrowed under the covers with one lamp on, muttering or whispering the lines under your breath and feeling the rhythm feeling the images feeling the writing breathing the words until it fills you to the brim.
I know this from experience.

Other favorites from this collection: America and Song. These words will be rattling around in my head for ages to come, I know it.
Special shoutout to City Lights Books and the cashier at the register who didn't look me once in the eye as I bought this, and instead gossiping with another employee. Maybe I'll write a poem about it.